Belonging
by janya.wrote.nightrose
Summary: Since apparently I have to belong to someone, I choose you." -Leah Clearwater She got away from the heartbreak and made a life for herself through sheer gumption. But now, at the end, as he watches those last breaths, they realize the truth. She's his.


**REVIEW!**

Sam is still alive when Leah dies. She's fifty-five and fully human, with some illness or another that if she'd only give in and phase again her body would be able to fight off. If she were so inclined.

She isn't. And though, Leah Clearwater is many things, she is certainly not weak-willed. A little death isn't going to stand in her way. She isn't a werewolf anymore, and she likes it that way.

He comes to watch her die. Emily isn't at his side- she stayed home with the kids. Leah had refused to be their godmother every time one popped out, in nauseatingly close proximity to one another. Even the one named after her, the oldest. Or the fifth, the one born less than six years later and named after her father, little Harry Uley with Sam's grin and Emily's marred beauty. Sam really couldn't keep his hands off Emily for five minutes to save Leah's heart.

Things _hadn't _picked back up. Leah's last period was when she was nineteen. They never started again. She never had a child.

The last time she loved, she was nineteen. She never got over him.

And he knows it as he kneels by her bed. "I'm here, Leah," he whispers.

For a little time, she can pretend everything is as it should have been. The three children are hers, made from her love and her lover, not some damn magic and her cursed thief of a cousin. He's hers, still, and they've lived their lives side by side.

It isn't that she hated life. No, she lived well, better than most of the pack. She ran away from the endless crushing _duty _and made a life of her own, with her own desires and built with her own hands. She went to college, admittedly a community one, but she has a pretty diploma to prove her work. She was more than smart enough for it. And she slaved her way up an organizational ladder in an actual career. She never aspired to kill vampires. The rest of the pack works at jobs, to feed themselves and their imprints and their bizarrely high number of children. Werewolves breed like rabbits.

Leah lives hers. Her friends are through the business. She doesn't date, but she flirts with the boy who brings the new copy paper right until the diagnosis.

"Thank you," she says to him. And there is silence, the first comfortable silence she's known for so long. This is where she always belonged.

Her eyes shift to Sam's face, as her breathing slows, her heart skipping. She knows he hears her dying, but his mind is somewhere else entirely. Back in _his _personal heaven. Where _he _belongs.

She sighs, her last ever. Her eyes close, for once no faces behind them, only an oddly restful blackness.

"I'm sorry," he says, and the words are sweeter than she expected. "I love you, Leah… you just… we weren't… soul mates."

_ And you tell me this, when I'm on my deathbed? Very sensitive, _she wants to hiss. But she's over the bitterness. It's given way to first pain and then resolve. She's given up anger, sorrow, everything, and settled for hard work and a lonely life she built herself. Instead, she answers with the truth. "You were mine, Sam. I just wasn't yours."

And with that she closes her eyes. All his efforts can't change her stubborn resolve to never, ever, open them again.

As he trudges home, an old sorrow redoubled on his back, he realizes her last words, taken out of context, might just as easily have been reversed.

Leah was his, until the last breath… but as much as he loves her, as total and complete as those feelings are (and they never fade, not even eclipsed as they are), his love is not his own. He could never be hers.

The pack comes for the funeral, waiting outside the graveyard in their other forms, howling their grief, while Sam sits alone in the first row. He holds Emily as she cries into his shoulder, and his huge form is shrunken. He's now without half of what he once had.

He feels the loss.

**REVIEW**!


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